Whitebox Wonderland

I've got the cabling in, now we're just waiting for the devices to plug into it," said William McDonnell one recent afternoon, taking a quick break between home installation jobs to talk about the current state of digital home integration.

"The work I do with a lot of my clients, basically what we've been doing is getting the wiring in, the structured cabling in, and then we wait until the industry comes along with the computer products that real people can really use," said the owner of Business Technology Consulting, a one-man digital home and small office system integration shop based in San Jose, Calif.

McDonnell said his customers are looking for everything from purpose-built entertainment centers to home servers. His challenge goes out to both the big vendors and small custom system builders alike: build easy-to-use, affordable devices that deliver what users want and they'll get snapped up like hotcakes.

It just so happens that vendors like Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel Corp. and its whitebox partners are thinking the same thing.

The Thick And The Thin Of It
The mini-ITX form factor, which Intel also calls the nettop, is one that excites digital home integrators like McDonnell and John Goldenne, president of Palatine, Ill.-based Digital Home Technologies.

Goldenne is looking for devices that can serve as fully loaded digital home entertainment centers with Internet connections, both to update content and for storage in the cloud.

"Off-site content and off-site storage is a great idea. It's already happening in the commercial industry," Goldenne said. His requirement for a mini-ITX-based entertainment center?

"I look at ease of installation and ease of programming. I don't want to have to get a degree on a product, nor do I want my techs to have to either," he said. Goldenne said his clients increasingly want to download movies and television episodes onto their computers and then watch them on their flat-panel screens. But there aren't many affordable out-of-the-box devices that let them do that, and jerry-rigging a solution means constantly plugging and unplugging wires from a laptop to a TV set.

Next: Sounds Like A Job For A Nettop